


to brighten up even your darkest knight

by Nokomis



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Flashbacks, Fluff and Humor, Found Family, Friendship bracelet, Gen, Hugs, Stephanie Brown's unconventional childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:26:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25050868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: While filing Batman’s paperwork as punishment for an unfortunate incident with the Batmobile, Steph discovers a momento from an early Cluemaster takedown.
Relationships: Stephanie Brown & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 55
Kudos: 347





	to brighten up even your darkest knight

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from "You've Got A Friend" because I thought it would be funny. || [my tumblr](https://nokomiss.tumblr.com/)

It wasn’t like Steph had _intended_ to crash the Batmobile into the harbor. 

Admittedly, she hadn’t precisely had permission to drive it. Neither had Robin, but that hadn’t stopped him from taking it out in the first place. Then Steph was the nearest available Bat to help when the situation with Mad Hatter on the docks had spiralled wildly out of control, and the only real way she’d seen to knock out the crudely but sturdily built tower Mad Hatter’d been using to amplify the mind control chips was to drive the Batmobile into it.

Robin had been fighting the Hatter himself, but there had been too many people being mind-controlled and they were going to swamp him and--

Steph was big into improv, and the best move seemed to be to drive the armored, tank-like car into the tower. She knew she couldn’t budge it on her own, she was out of explosives, and using what was at hand? Totally her thing.

And for a few glorious seconds, while driving the car and taking out the tower and seeing the horde of mind-controlled people drop to the ground like puppets with their strings cut, she felt triumphant. Successful, even!

Oh, how quickly it changed.

She realized immediately how close to the edge of the dock they actually were. She did a hard right, tires squealing, spinning the wheel and hitting the brakes and she came so, so close to saving it. But then the back right tire caught the edge, and _apparently_ the car’s weight distribution needed some serious readjustment because it immediately began to teeter, and before Steph could find a button to start up a jet-pack or hover-mode or _anything_ useful, it went toppling off the dock.

She bailed, leaping out the window as the car plunged into the water. She managed to get a grip onto the side of the dock and as she pulled herself up, was treated to the rare sight of Damian’s horrified face. 

“Batman’s gonna kill you,” he said.

Steph peered back over the side of the dock. Beneath the dark water, the lights were still on, and then abruptly flickered out, presumably as water filled the interior and shorted out the computer.

Probably she should have rolled _up_ the window and rode out the fall. Probably there was a submarine button or something she didn’t know about.

“Uh,” Steph said, at a loss. “I was never here?”

*

Happily for her, Bruce’s no-kill rule still covered instances of vehicular destruction.

He didn’t even yell at her, or try to fire her, or anything. Instead, when she described the terrible sequence of events that lead to his car ending up in the bottom of the harbor, he just rested his hand across his eyes and said, “I’ve heard enough.”

“I do want to reiterate that I did not take the car in the first place, that was your preteen son. I was simply _saving lives_.” Steph figured she might as well lay it on heavy. She knew logically that as Batgirl, Bruce didn’t have firing powers, but apparently there were a few lingering feelings left from her brief Robin days. “Also, if you’d let me drive it before like I’ve asked oh so many times, I would have known what all the buttons did. There are so many of them, man. So many. Really, it’s your own fault for poor interior design.” 

“Please stop,” Bruce said from behind his hand. “Just… Go. I’ll get the car out of the harbor.”

Steph should offer to help, she knew it. It was the only polite thing to do. But there was also the chance that if she skedaddled right now, Bruce would get distracted by a bigger crime or an alien invasion or something and then she would be free and clear.

So she hurried out of the cave as quickly as she could without actually running.

*

Unfortunately, aliens failed to attack and distract Batman.

Steph dreaded seeing Batman the next day. She spent the evening stress-cleaning and doing her homework, avoiding any thought of what Bruce’s punishment for _destroying a Batmobile_ might be.

The worst he could do was like, try to ground her. And since Steph wasn’t one of Bruce’s kids, so he couldn’t actually ground her, but in one of the most stunningly dad-like moves she’d ever seen him pull, he conspired with Babs to put her on filing duty.

Steph hadn’t even known that filing _was_ a duty they had. 

She stared at the pile of neatly labelled crime scene photos, autopsy and police reports, and various other bits of neatly bagged evidence and paperwork. There was a lot of it. Like, a small mountain, which made total sense given that Steph had been around for years and had even been Robin and had no idea that filing was something that they did.

She was in a room off one of the storage rooms. There was a whole wall of neatly labeled drawers, bigger and deeper than typical filing cabinets. There were numbers on the outsides, and she set about matching evidence to case files. 

If putting away a mountain of paperwork was all it cost for the destruction of a Batmobile, she was willing to put in the work. 

She turned on some jams, tried to make it fun, dancing her way around the room and pulling out the drawers with gusto, but she kept glimpsing the contents of the papers she was putting away -- some of the photos were pretty gnarly -- and it kept harshing the vibe. So she set about to being as efficient as possible.

She was halfway through when she was flipping through dividers to find the case a police report went with, when she caught a glimpse of a familiar name.

She knew Batman had a file on her father. He was a criminal, after all. Batman had arrested him a dozen times. But while she’d added stuff to the file on the computer and sometimes went online to add embarrassing and true facts to his wiki page, she’d never looked at Batman’s paper files on him.

The file itself was surprising. Most of the papers covering stuff she knew from her Spoiler days were sparse, clearly having been done mostly digitally, but there were a few hand-written logs from Batman’s earlier days shoved in the file, too, and even a few evidence bags.

She pulled the evidence bags out, curious, and they were predictable -- a few of her dad’s moronic clues, a bandana matching one of her dad’s earlier costumes with a few long blond hairs still clinging to it, and… 

A friendship bracelet, individually bagged and unlabelled.

It was purple and white, intricately and inexpertly knotted out of embroidery floss. Steph remembered how long she had labored over it -- eons, it had felt like, though it had probably only been a few hours.

She had intended to give it to her second-grade bestie, Kerri. She’d been measuring it on her wrist, tying the knot loosely and admiring how it awesome it had turned out, way better than the one that Missy had given Kerri, when she’d heard busting glass and yells coming from the living room.

She still remembered the way her stomach had dropped with excitement, like she’d just gone on a roller coaster, when she realized that _Batman_ was in her living room. Not only was freaking _Batman_ in her living room, but he was punching her dad in the face so hard that she saw blood gushing out of his nose.

Then she remembered that she’d made a sound -- probably a squeal of happiness, but thinking back, Batman had probably interpreted it very differently. Her dad, dazed and bleeding, had quickly been zip-tied, and Batman had knelt down in front of her, his cape draped so that she couldn’t see her dad, and had quietly asked if she was here alone. 

“My dad’s right there,” she remembered saying, eyebrow raised as she pointed over Batman’s shoulder. “The guy you just punched? Is his nose broken? That was awesome.”

“Your dad did some bad things,” Batman had said in that gentle voice.

“No shit,” Steph had replied. “Is he gonna stay in Blackgate this time?”

Batman’s mouth had twisted, and he’d said, “Hopefully. Is your mother here?”

Steph had nodded, gesturing back up towards her parents’ bedroom. “She’s sleeping,” she had explained, and Batman had accepted that answer, hadn’t asked about why her mom had slept through a breaking window and -- was the living room table broken? “Oh no,” she’d said, staring at the mess. “My reading book was there.”

Batman had stared at her.

“From school! I’m supposed to read from it every night and Dad was supposed to listen to me and now my book is all messed up and no one’s gonna listen to me and I’m gonna fail!” Steph had wailed.

Batman had looked over his shoulder at the mess that was the Brown living room: shattered glass on the floor, broken furniture, the tv on its side but still playing a Full House rerun, and in the middle of it all a torn and slightly bloody second-grade reading book.

He’d raised himself up, stepped over her dad, who by that point had gone quiet, and retrieved the book. He shook it out to get the glass out, smoothed the pages, and said, “I have to leave when GCPD gets here, but maybe you can read to me until then?”

Steph had blinked, subdued, and said, “Okay.” Batman had sat beside her on the stairs, listening patiently as she read her story -- he’d only had to help her with a few words, and she had been super proud of that -- until the sound of sirens had echoed through the living room. 

Batman had said, “I have to leave,” and Steph, starstruck with how her boring evening had turned into something amazing -- her dad getting his ass kicked and then _Batman himself_ helping her with her homework -- had flung her arms around him. 

“Here!” she’d said, when she noticed the bracelet she’d made for Kerri still on her wrist. She held it out to him. “Thanks! For hitting my dad and also for helping me with my homework!”

Batman had stared at the bracelet like he didn’t know what it was, so she’d explained that she made it herself with supplies the art teacher had given her. “She says I’m real creative and that it’s a shame,” Steph had said, even though she hadn’t quite understood _what_ was a shame about her.

“Thank you,” Batman had said, and had tucked her friendship bracelet into a compartment on his belt before exiting through the broken window.

It hadn’t been the only meeting she’d had with Batman before donning a mask herself, but it had definitely been a formative one. 

She stared down at the friendship bracelet. She didn’t know if it was sweet that he’d kept it, tucked away in the appropriate file, or if it was a total goober Bruce move to _bag a friendship bracelet as evidence._

She decided that actions, like people, could be multifaceted. 

Either way, she was absolutely about to give him hell about it.

As soon as she heard one of the cars pull into the cave, she abandoned the filing, figuring that if it had sat there this long, it could absolutely wait another few minutes.

Bruce and Damian were climbing out of the car when she emerged from the filing room, bracelet tucked into the pocket of her sweatpants. She noticed that the car she’d sunk was nowhere in sight, but Bruce had plenty of spares. He went through Batmobiles faster than most people went through shampoo. 

“Hi!” she said cheerfully.

Damian grumbled a greeting; clearly he was still sore about her ratting him out. Bruce pulled off the cowl as he headed for the computer. “Finished already?”

“Not quite,” Steph said, still cheerfully. “It’s been very educational, though!”

“Learning future job skills?” Damian offered.

“Learning what an absolutely adorable loser your old man is, more like,” Steph said.

This stopped both Waynes in their tracks.

“I don’t follow,” Damian said, brow crinkled in that way that made him look like an old man. Steph loved that face. 

Bruce looked equally confused and mildly concerned. Steph wondered what other juicy tidbits were hidden neatly away in evidence bags. She decided to skip the speech she’d mentally rehearsed about cherishing friendship and jumped straight for the chase. She pulled out the evidence bag from her pocket with a “Ta-da!”

“It’s some tangled string?” Damian said. “Why is that an indication of loserdom?”

Bruce, on the other hand, went through a minor face journey, which for him meant a series of very subtle facial expressions: the crinkled brow of confusion, the slight widening of eyes in realization, the soft up-turned corners of his mouth in a smile.

Steph froze, still brandishing the friendship bracelet. Bruce was smiling. Not in a Jokerized way, but in a soft, fond way that he normally reserved for when Damian did something childlike or Tim accidentally called him dad or Cass flung herself into his hug. 

Damian noticed the smile, too. “Father, Brown appears to have broken you. Is it evil string?”

“It’s a friendship bracelet,” Steph explained.

“It’s unmarked evidence,” Damian said. “Likely it was a crime against good taste.”

“Stephanie gave it to me,” Bruce said, reaching out and taking the bag. “Ten years ago?”

“I was seven, so more like twelve, old man,” Steph said. “Memory’s the first thing to go, you know.”

Damian’s brow furrowed. “Brown wasn’t involved in vigilante activity as a child.”

“Not from this end of it, anyway,” Steph said.

Damian blinked at her. 

“Your dad busted into my house and punched my dad in the face. It was awesome,” she said.

Bruce looked briefly heavenward. “I didn’t realize there was a child on the premises.” 

“It was a school night and I was a second grader,” Steph pointed out. “Where would I have been, out clubbing?” She turned back to Damian. “He broke a bunch of stuff and clearly felt bad so he did my homework with me.”

The small smile returned. “You were a good reader at that age, as I recall.”

“Yeah,” Steph said, a warm, happy feeling in her chest. It didn’t stop her from adding the next part, “and I got to spend an hour in the principal’s and guidance councelor’s offices the next day because for some reason no one believed me when I said that my reading book was all ripped and crumpled because of Batman.”

Damian was looking back and forth between them like he’d never seen either of them. 

Steph continued before Bruce did something else uncharacteristic like apologize; she’d never reacted well to that. “So between that, and how our tv always made a weird buzzing noise after you kicked my dad into it, I think that actually we’re totally even on the Batmobile I sank. Like, cosmically. Karmically.”

“Did you dig this out just to plead your case against finishing the filing?” Bruce asked. He hadn’t opened the bag, but was tracing his thumb along the edges of the bracelet.

“How the hell would I have known that you kept it? Especially in an evidence bag,” Steph said. “Didn’t anyone ever give you a friendship bracelet before?”

There was a resounding silence.

“Oh,” Steph said. She reached out and took the bag from him, ripping it open and pulling out the bracelet. She was glad that seven-year-old Steph hadn’t gotten around to trimming the threads at the end, she thought that it would fit. “Wrist, please!”

Damian was still watching them avidly, like he did whenever Titus and Alfred the Cat were in the same room. Making sure that they weren’t about to start snapping at each other, Steph realized. He’d never really seen them get along. She wanted to stop to tell Damian that she and Bruce weren’t always contentious, that they did have their moments, that she was pretty sure that she just understood him in a very different way from the other Robins, but this moment was too important to derail like that.

Bruce obediently pulled off his gloves and held out his left wrist. Steph wrapped the bracelet around and tied it off neatly. “There. That’s what you do with a friendship bracelet. It’s so super weird that you bagged it up and filed it away, just so you know. But… I’m kinda glad you did, because now you have to wear it.”

Then Bruce did something that surprised her even more than an apology would have: he pulled her into a hug. Steph was so surprised that she spent a few seconds just standing there, arms awkwardly at her side, before wrapping them around Bruce and tucking her face into his chest, content. 

When the hug finally broke, Steph stepped back and said, “So we’re even?”

“Almost,” Bruce said. He gestured towards Damian. “Have Damian help you finish the filing, since he was the one who took the car in the first place.”

“Come on, squirt,” Steph said over Damian’s protests. “You heard the man. Gotta pay our dues.”

Damian shot his father one last look, and then slouched towards the filing room. 

Steph grinned at Bruce. The bracelet looked silly on his wrist in contrast to the Batman uniform, but he showed no signs of taking it off. 

There were a lot of things she could say -- about how strange it was to her still that she was a part of all this, about how much Batman had meant to her, about how much he still did. About all the strange ways the past and present contrasted with each other, about why certain things he’d done had hurt so badly. But nothing felt right, and really, she didn’t want to dredge up any of those things.

Instead, she gave him a thumbs up, and hoped that this contended, happy feeling could last.


End file.
